Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
MONDAY 26 APRIL 1999
MR CHRIS
BARNHAM, MR
LEE BROWN,
MS SUE
DUNCAN AND
MR JEREMY
GROOMBRIDGE
20. Mr Groombridge a few moments ago did say
that some quite complex issues would be dealt with in that initial
interview. There has been some anxiety expressed, and I think
perhaps I share a little of this, that 50 minutes, even 60 stretching
it, with the extra benefits analysis being done, is a very short
period of time to be able to deal with quite a broad range of
things.
(Mr Brown) It is an average. There will
be a range of times. The range will go from 12 minutes, which
means you might check the form and find out the person has declared
they are not eligible, but it could last up to 120 minutes. I
think we get an average because some clients' claims will be straight
forward and simple. They will be quickly processed. They will
have answered all the questions on the form, they will know what
they want to do and the role of the adviser will be to encourage
and facilitate. There will be others, as you are suggesting, who
have more complex and difficult problems and there will be time
available to deal with them. If we cannot deal with them all in
that interview, there is the possibility of case loading and it
is those clients with the more complex problems that one would
expect to be case loaded so that over a period of time you can
deal with the issues.
21. Will it be the initiative of the personal
adviser to decide the length of that interview?
(Mr Brown) Yes.
22. It will not be subject to any formula?
(Mr Brown) No. The key to this Single
Work-focused Gateway is that we get a more personalised and tailored
service than exists at the moment. That means we have to empower
clients, clients and the personal advisers, to determine how long
the interview needs to last. The customer focus will come from
the personal adviser being able to spend the time necessary with
the individual.
23. I am very much in favour of that approach.
One of the great strengths seems to me that the personal adviser
will build up an on-going relationship with the customer and will
be able to advise on benefits eligibility, even presumably for
those benefits for which the person has not initially claimed.
(Mr Brown) Yes.
24. But within that period of the interview,
let us take that initial interview, the 50 minutes average, how
will the balance be determined between the benefits advice and
exploring the various work possibilities, child care possibilities,
training possibilities and so on? Is that again going to be determined
by the personal adviser?
(Mr Brown) Yes. Determined by the personal
adviser and the client because the client will have filled in
their claim form and it is from going through the claim form and
looking at the elements within it that there will be evidence
for the personal adviser to take the interview in particular directions
or the client to take it in particular directions. I think it
is not an algorithmic situation that you will be in but one which
will be unique to each individual.
25. Finally, a similar question to the initial
registration and orientation interview: any possibility or any
likelihood of delays in processing claims as a result of the requirement
for each claimant to go through the Work-focused interview?
(Mr Brown) There should not be. There
will be a target for the benefit claim, the personal adviser interview
to be a maximum of three days after the interview with the registration
and orientation adviser. The aim will be to get the claim processed
as quickly as possible after the work-focused interview so that
we can pay the client, if they are entitled, as quickly as possible.
Chairman
26. I want to turn to Karen Buck in a moment
but can I just clarify an answer that you gave to Chris a moment
ago. Am I safe to assume that the new process will seek to maximise
entitlement to benefit?
(Mr Brown) I am not sure what you mean
by "maximise entitlement to benefit"?
27. Will it go prospecting for benefits that
the customers may not be aware they are entitled to before they
arrive but will be told about before they leave?
(Mr Brown) I think over a period of time,
including the Work-focused interview and case loading, that will
occur. One of the things we want to do is make sure clients are
aware of the various in work benefits that are available, and
draw their attention to how housing benefit, council tax benefit
can be a work incentive and what other benefits exist that can
be work incentives to clients.
28. If you came across somebody who was entitled
potentially to a Disability Living Allowance, would that be drawn
to their attention also?
(Mr Brown) Yes.
Ms Buck
29. Before I ask some questions which in a way
follow on from Chris's, and client groups and exemptions and sensitivities
that one would expect of the advisers, can I make a quick point
about the extremely helpful brief that was given to us? It is
picking up the point about child care—which I do not think
is covered elsewhere in some of the questions to be asked—where
you list all the tasks that you anticipate the personal adviser
would deal with, the words "child care" do not appear.
Now I appreciate that they are implicit, you discuss the client's
circumstances and barriers to work in particular, but it does
worry me a little bit because when I have sat in on the New Deal
personal adviser assessments, which I thought were marvellous
and absolutely wonderful, what happened in terms of advising people
about the availability of child care was to say "Here is
a list of childminders" and this is not going to work. Certainly
it is not going to work in areas of child care shortage which
are vast areas of London and the South East. I just want to be
reassured that you will seek to pull out the issue of child care
much more explicitly and make it something which is more than
simply handing out a piece of paper that has a list of registered
childminders already in your area. Indeed, child care is so fundamental
that that kind of handing out of information is not good enough.
Do you want to respond to that?
(Mr Brown) Yes, I will respond to that
and then Chris may want to add something. Within the period of
time for the personal adviser interview there is an allowance
to discuss child care with the client so that they can begin to
explore the type of child care arrangements that are needed. Chris
may want to add to that.
(Mr Barnham) The experience you are talking about,
I presume, is the New Deal for Lone Parents?
30. Yes.
(Mr Barnham) There has been an element
of child care advice in that, obviously not always as good as
you would have wanted, and also support for people's child care
while they are looking for work as well. To a certain extent that
has not been able to be as good as we would have wanted because
the New Deal for Lone Parents was ahead of the child care strategy.
There is more coming on stream and what we are doing at the moment
is for each of the pilots that starts in June, and longer term
for the November pilots as well, looking at what the local plans
say for child care and trying to match that up with what the implementation
teams will have on offer and be able to offer people locally.
It is still early to say exactly what the experience will be but
it ought to be getting better for lone parents and, indeed, for
others. One thing that this will give us is the sorts of expertise
and training that New Deal for Lone Parents advisers can offer
to people will be available more widely because it is not just
lone parents, for example, that have child care needs. We expect
the position to get better in these pilots. More crucially from
April 2000 there will be a very important need for good quality
child care to be available locally in each neighbourhood because
we will be asking people to do things that they have not had to
do before, they will have to come and talk to a personal adviser
where at the moment it is completely voluntary. That is an issue
that we have got on the books and one that we will be looking
at very closely.
31. Can you assure me that whatever else there
is produced a list of different tasks and responsibilities of
personal advisers, whether that is in terms of recruitment or
training, so you do pull out child care and make it explicit?
It is too important to be left to an implicit subclause of barriers
to work.
(Mr Brown) It is one of the areas that
we will be covering at the conference on 16/17 June.
32. If I may talk to you a little bit about
the issue of exemptions. Obviously once the interviews become
compulsory from April 2000, in relation to the issue of who is
likely to be exempted, or available for the adviser to choose
to defer an interview, is very, very important. I think everyone,
certainly everybody in this room, wants this to work and I think
what is important is that we do not get quite quickly into some
of those examples which get round on the grapevine, and even in
the media, about inappropriate requests to attend for an interview.
Surely if we knew of those the whole atmosphere would start to
flounder quite quickly? We know that some of the categories of
people for exemption at the moment are recently bereaved, single
parents with very young children, people with demanding caring
responsibilities and those suffering from acute illnesses. Before
I ask you about another category can I just say that even those
are very, very open to interpretation. In what form is the advice
going to be given around, let us say, particularly those categories,
first of all? Is that going to be turned into an explicit checklist
of people not to invite and, if so, are we talking about the recently
bereaved, within six months, are we talking about parents of children
under three? Can you give me a little more information?
(Mr Groombridge) Can I start perhaps
and Lee will come in on the guidance itself. On this whole question
of deferrals at interview, I think Ministers are quite clear that
they do not want to go back to the situation where currently we
treat people in fairly rigid categories by saying: "The benefit
limits the treatment that you get when you enter the benefit system"
and it is prescribed in a rigid way. I think, therefore, what
they are more inclined to say is that an interview conducted immediately
as people enter the benefits system, would not clearly be a meaningful
experience such as in some of the circumstances that you have
described. Certainly the kinds of examples that ministers have
quoted have been very much non-exhaustive. They include categories
like, for example, recently bereaved widows who may be grieving
over the fact that their loved one has died. Clearly that is not
a circumstance in which you would conduct an immediate interview
about the possibility of work. So really the watchword is very
much one of sensitivity and whether a discussion at that point
in time would be meaningful. I do not think that we could get
to a point where we can define in a black and white sort of way
exactly the circumstances in which that would be the case. Now,
Lee will describe the guidance but my understanding is that both
the training and the guidance itself will be very much geared
towards exhorting advisers to be sensitive and to have regard
to whether or not there is a realistic prospect of that interview
being meaningful.
(Mr Brown) I think what we will be seeking to do is
a number of things. I think before I discuss guidance, what we
have to do is look at the type of person we want to become a personal
adviser. The job specification that we put out in response to
the design describes in detail the responsibilities and accountabilities
of the individuals that take it up, the types of competencies
they need to have and the approach they need to take to all of
this, that is, focused on the need for someone who wants to do
the job, is sensitive to client needs, is client focused. So that
is the first aspect of it. The second aspect of it is we will
be putting on Single Work-focused Gateway specific training which
will last probably four or five days as it says in the memorandum
you saw. The purpose of that is so advisers understand the processes
that the Single Work-focused Gateway is seeking to put in place,
where the Single Work-focused Gateway fits in with welfare reform
and the type of cultural change we want to bring about through
this. That is the background. What we should be aiming for is
personal advisers who understand the nature of the relationship
they should have with clients, which is what Jeremy has been describing.
The guidance will be as Jeremy said. It will not be a list of
client groups that you should exclude from interviews but it will
be saying to personal advisers they need to judge in each situation
whether this client is able and capable of taking full advantage
of the work-focused interview and if not defer it. It is a situation
where we do not want to categorise people and in categorising
remove them from the help that is available. We need to be sensitive.
It may very well be that someone who has just been widowed does
want to get a job right away, maybe a lone parent wants a job
right away, and it may be that a disabled person wants to find
work. We need to operate on that basis and help them take advantage
of it. I do not think it is possible for us to have a list of
exclusions from interviews which are just placed in black and
white in front of the personal advisers.
33. Part of me is enormously sympathetic to
that, part of me is terribly worried by it. I certainly see the
dangers of having a list approach and ending up so comprehensive
in your list of exclusions that you are not touching 95 per cent
of the people. On the other hand, in a sense an element of compulsion
in this is heavy. It is a real pressure. I guess what I feel from
what you are saying is you are putting an awful lot of trust in
people who have a very short period of training. There is a lot
of potential for it to go wrong. The training is important but
guidance is going to be very important not only to avoid very
bad backfiring stories that will end up all over the press and
will cause damage to people but there is a danger of duplication.
I tell an anecdote which is very short where I am sitting in on
a housing interview in my local housing office with a woman coming
out of hospital and seeking to go down the homelessness route,
seeking to be rehoused by the council, who has already been through
an extensive process of being interviewed by psychiatric social
workers, by all the staff in the hospitals in terms of benefit
claims and preparation to leave hospital, community care preparation
and what have you, and yet the system requires her to go through
another interview with a separate person who is trained in homelessness,
probably actually broadly comparable in terms of skill, salary
and all the rest of it that we are expecting for the personal
adviser who asks the question in the interview: "When did
you last attempt suicide?" It just worries me that we are
expecting an awful lot of these people and I can see all kinds
of dangers from it unless the guidance that you give is very,
very explicit. How are people going to be taught in five days
to deal not only with the groups we have already outlined, people
with serious mental health problems, what about people in temporary
accommodation? In London alone tens of thousands of people are
in temporary accommodation, the vast majority of them would not
be appropriate at this moment in time.
(Mr Brown) The fact is it is not just
Single Work-focused Gateway specific training. It is what I was
saying earlier, we will be recruiting people to do this personal
adviser's job from the Employment Service, Benefit Agency, local
authorities, Child Support Agency, who in the main are already
advisers of one kind or the other. We know that there will be
a number of New Deal personal advisers and New Deal for Lone Parents
advisers becoming Single Work-focused Gateway personal advisers.
They will be bringing with them a range of competencies and skills,
they will be bringing with them accumulated training. They will
have gone through training in the past. What we will be doing
is adding to that training. As well as the Single Work-focused
Gateway specific there will be developmental training available.
What each newly appointed adviser will do will be to discuss with
their manager what training they need to be able to carry out
this job. Amongst that training is training to help special clients,
clients with special needs. Those who have not gone through that
training in the past will go through it before they are able to
become Single Work-focused Gateway advisers. They will develop
a contract with their manager, the manager will judge when they
have come back from that training whether they are ready to be
Single Work-focused Gateway personal advisers or not and carry
out the improvement work that is necessary for them to operate.
I think what we have got to see is these will be amongst the best
staff from the Employment Service, Benefit Agencies and local
authorities becoming Single Work-
focused Gateway personal advisers and being able
to draw upon the existing training modules that are available
from the Employment Service, Benefits Agency and local authorities
to deal with these.
34. How are you going to prevent the quite distinct
pattern of variations between advisers and between areas over
these kinds of issues because it may very well be that one adviser
or even a cluster of advisers in a particular area, perhaps with
a particular background or mindset for example to mothers of very
young children working, will adopt a particular approach towards
those interviews than people in another area?
(Mr Brown) Within the district or area
the advisers will operate as a virtual team. What will happen
in each locality is there will be a team of advisers who are delivering
the Single Work-focused Gateway. They will have a manager who
will be able to get them together as a group to discuss scenarios,
to ensure there is a consistency of interpretation and action.
Across the district as a whole the people who are currently implementation
managers after June 28 in the basic pilot will have the task of
looking at what is happening in each office to ensure that there
is consistency and to work towards that consistency. We are also
telling people who are becoming advisers that we expect them to
be continuously developing themselves and that there is a range
of modules and training courses available within the organisations
so that if weaknesses or inconsistencies in their approaches are
identified we can seek to give them the training or the modular
information they need in order to become more consistent.
Chairman
35. Jeremy?
(Mr Groombridge) I just want to add to
that by saying that it is quite important to recognise that personal
advisers will not be working in isolation, the idea is of them
working with multi-disciplinary teams, having access to specialist
support. Indeed in some of the difficult and hard cases that you
mentioned, and you quoted some of the mentally ill as an example
of that, I think it is probable that individuals will want to
bring an advocate along with them. I think it would again be a
question of working with them together. Personal advisers are
not going to be working in isolation and neither will they be
working in a way that is not monitored.
(Mr Barnham) Could I just add a point to that? All
the points you raise are really very important ones and it is
essential, and it will happen, that this will be thoroughly monitored
and thoroughly evaluated and very, very closely watched in the
way it works. But fundamentally this issue is really one of the
key things that policy is about. Can you move away from a system
that says if you are claiming that benefit you get this treatment.
What the Single Gateway is trying to achieve is to treat people
more according to their personal circumstances. It is really quite
difficult to see how you can do that if you recreate a sub-set
of categories below the benefit level. Yes, the guidance is extremely
important, the way people are trained is extremely important,
but fundamentally that is one of the things that this is testing,
how well can that work.
Ms Buck
36. I do understand that, I am just slightly
alarmed by what I may be wrongly interpreting as being probably
these problems will not arise, that these will be such good people.
I find that slightly worrying and worth mentioning. Can I put
another question? What happens to people who do not turn up for
the interview?
(Mr Brown) At what point?
37. The initial interview for the work-focused
interview.
(Mr Groombridge) I will describe the
position with regard to the regime that, subject to legislation,
will be in place and operated from April of next year. For people
who do not come in for the Work-focused interview, the way the
legislation is phrased, who do not participate in the Work-
focused interview, their claim will not be regarded
as having been made until they do come in for the interview. For
people who fail to attend or participate in a deferred interview,
when that interview is arranged and set up, then their benefit
will be terminated if they refuse to attend. There will be measures
taken to make sure that they know when it is going to take place,
and there will be a number of attempts made to refix that interview
if they do not attend. People who fail to attend or participate
in an interview which is triggered by events that will be specified
in the regulations as follow-up interviews, will face a reduction
in benefit if they do not attend that follow-up interview.
38. What sort of Work-focused intervention would
be appropriate, do you think, for people who make a claim for
Invalid Care Allowance, given the restrictions on what Invalid
Care Allowance allows you to do?
(Mr Groombridge) There is a number of
reasons for encouraging carers to come through the Gateway to
claim their Invalid Care Allowance. One of the things that we
hope we will be able to encourage them to do is to start thinking
about either what employment, if any, they can fit around their
caring responsibilities but also about how to begin to plan for
when those caring responsibilities end or when there is a change
in the nature of them. So what we are trying to do is first to
establish a kind of relationship with them which enables them
to speak to a personal adviser but also to get them to start thinking
about the possibilities of either work which they could fit around
the benefit or work that can take place after benefit has ceased.
39. Clients who are claiming short term incapacity
benefit will have their period of incapacity covered by medical
certificates. Will these clients receive a work-focused interview
at the beginning of the claim?
(Mr Groombridge) Yes, the idea is that
the work-focused interview should take place at the outset because
again, as I explained earlier, we want to encourage them to think
about what happens once, hopefully, they begin to recover. It
is a long term process of planning, a step by step approach to
independence.
| 
